


Balancing Roles

by imgoingtocrash



Series: Cloak 'verse [3]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: Rebels
Genre: AU, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Father-Son Relationship, Fluff, Found Family, Gen, balancing the jedi/padawan dynamic with the father/son dynamic, have some Dorky Dad Kanan with your angst, post-3x01
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-23
Updated: 2017-10-23
Packaged: 2019-01-21 15:22:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,278
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12460524
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/imgoingtocrash/pseuds/imgoingtocrash
Summary: "“I…” Ezra stops himself, thinking before he starts again. “I know that we talked about, um. Me not trying to take the blame for what happened on Malachor. I’m working on that, I guess. The Sith Holochron—it said things. Whispered all of these doubts into my ear to try and make me stronger.”“I know,” Kanan replies, nodding even though he really doesn’t know. He can’t encapsulate what being that close to falling must have felt like. “You were very brave to go against it as long as you did alone, but you can’t take what it said to heart. It was manipulating you just like Maul did.”“Yeah. It’s…” Ezra gives him a put-upon sigh. “It’s what the Holochron didn’t say, okay?”“What does that mean?”"While Ezra and Kanan made up as Master and Padawan after their talk in the Krykna caves, they still need to address some of Ezra's anger at himself about his role in the events on Malachor as Kanan's son.





	Balancing Roles

**Author's Note:**

> I mentioned writing another, more angsty fic in the author's notes of On The Scandocs, but then real life kicked in and I never actually published it. I also went back and forth on the ending, but after re-reading this I remembered how much I love this fic as a whole and wanted to get something out to celebrate Season 4 finally airing (even if this takes place in Season 3).
> 
> Once again for anyone new: this fic takes place in an AU that's mostly backstory canon divergence, but otherwise keeps with canon. Meaning you'll probably want to read the other two fics in the series for context, or at the very least the description for the series.
> 
> Thanks to everyone that's commented/bookmarked/given kudos to this series! I have a soft spot for it and despite my current lack of free time, enjoy writing more little fics for it. Enjoy!

“Hey,” Ezra says, his feet lightly scraping over the combination of Chopper Base’s metal flooring and excessive amounts of sand. Kanan’s been just within the base’s perimeter for an hour now, despite his learned tricks from the Bedu to keep himself safe. It’s easier for him to be found by others in this meditation spot rather than far out amongst the creatures. 

Things between himself and Ezra—between himself and the rest of the crew—have been too fractured as of late. He’s not out here to get away from them anymore, but simply to realign himself with the Force in an open, quiet area. No more hiding in his bunk or purposefully away from places he knows the _Ghost_ crew congregates.

“I wondered if you were ever going to come over,” Kanan says, chuckling when Ezra gives no response. He imagines the inquisitive scrunch of Ezra’s brow. “I heard you pacing and mumbling to yourself behind those crates,” he states, amused. “Also, you know.” He uses two of his fingers to point between himself and his approximation of where Ezra is to illustrate their connection.

“Blast the Force,” Ezra mumbles halfheartedly, ungraceful and kicking up sand as he flops himself next to Kanan on the ground.

“Ooo.” Kanan sucks a bit of air between his teeth. “Back at the temple cursing the Force like that would be worth a few days in isolated reflection.”

Kanan relaxes his meditating posture, stretching his legs out and allowing his kneecaps to pop and hoping that matching Ezra’s casual demeanor will make him more comfortable. They’d patched things up better in the tunnels with the Krykna, but Ezra was still much too twitchy for his liking. 

Ezra had been nothing but overflowing confidence and energy before they’d started the ways of the Jedi again just a few years ago. Before Malachor.

 

(Kanan has too many memories of Ezra crying in his arms in cases such as that, he thinks. Too many memories of such an occurrence at all.

Ezra, just four years old—no, now five—and shaking from the cold, shaking from his sobs, pleading to back go to a home currently being raised in flames.

Ezra waking up from nightmares, twitching on a shared one-bedroom pay-by-the-night hotel mattress screaming _They’re coming for us_ and quietly asking between sniffles _Why does the Force feel so_ dark?

Kanan feeling so hopeless because Ezra misses being a youngling, misses home, kept that stupid cloak since they left Kaller, and Kanan has no way to bring it back and nothing to give but reassurances and physical comfort.

Kanan knowing he can’t bring Ezra’s parents back, that just because Ezra didn’t know them doesn’t mean he’s not upset enough to break down in front of someone he considers a total stranger when it’s confirmed that they’re gone.

And then Malachor. He’ll never forget how his eyes burned with even the smallest movement, searching in an unrelenting darkness. He had to see Ezra, if he could only catch his eyes, match their gazes— _breathe, Ezra, you have to breathe_. He could only feel his child’s head shaking back and forth against his chest, tears absorbing into his shirt, his repeated _It’s not okay_ ’s against Kanan’s attempted platitudes that it was okay, they were alive.

Force, he misses seeing Ezra smile.)

 

He imagines Ezra’s lip tilting up just a bit when he replies. “The only reason you know that is because you got in trouble so much.”

“Me? Trouble?” He swears he can hear Ezra’s eyes rolling. It’s a small comfort that some things never change. “Well, not for that, at least. Though Master Billaba used to call me—“

“I remember.” Ezra cuts him off good-naturedly, but lapses into silence quickly after interrupting him. He can hear Ezra’s clothes shuffling. There’s a quick snap like the sound of one of Kanan’s hair ties against his wrist and then some repeated movement. Ezra’s playing with a loose thread, maybe.

Ezra’s being particularly evasive, toeing the line between actually talking to Kanan and staying wrapped up in familiar patterns of banter. “What’s up?” he asks, flipping his mask in his hands. He’s trying to be more comfortable about taking it on and off, especially around the crew. While it does help his eyes not strain uselessly, it’s always felt more about the scar. Either protecting them from it or trying to forget, maybe.

“I…” Ezra stops himself, thinking before he starts again. “I know that we talked about, um. Me not trying to take the blame for what happened on Malachor. I’m working on that, I guess. The Sith Holochron—it said things. Whispered all of these doubts into my ear to try and make me stronger.”

“I know,” Kanan replies, nodding even though he really doesn’t know. He can’t encapsulate what being that close to falling must have felt like. “You were very brave to go against it as long as you did alone, but you can’t take what it said to heart. It was manipulating you just like Maul did.”

“Yeah. It’s…” Ezra gives him a put-upon sigh. “It’s what the Holochron didn’t say, okay?”

“What does that mean?”

“It said all kinds of stuff about how I hurt you, how I abandoned you and couldn’t protect you. That I was a bad padawan. That you were never going to recover and I would just have to get used to you hating me for the rest of my life until you finally decided to leave me behind for good.”

“Ezra, I would _never_ —“

“It didn’t make up any of the bad things I felt as your son,” Ezra blurts over him. Kanan’s mouth hangs open from both its uncompleted sentence and a beat of silence where he simply cannot figure out how to respond. “Kanan, I have been with you since I was five years old. You’ve had to drag me around snot-nosed and crying since you were almost as old as I am right now. I can’t even imagine—”

“Ezra—“

“No, Kanan! Don’t say it wasn’t hard. Don’t act like you taking care of me was something everyone would do, because it wasn’t. I could’ve died with the rest of the kids in the créche. I _should_ have, but I was with _you_. You’ve always protected me. You took farking awful jobs to take care of me and you never acted like it was hard even though I know it would have been easier to do all of it without me to worry about. And I am _tired_ —“ Ezra takes in a breath, his voice cracking against the exhale. “I am so _angry_ that I couldn’t be there for you. I was so busy with trying to be the better Jedi that I forgot to be a good son, and I hate myself so much for that.”

Ezra at twelve, ten, or five might have already been crying by this point, but the teenager to his right simply exhales shakily, maybe only wiping an errant tear with one of his physically vibrating fists.

Kanan feels along the ground for a moment, running his hand from its original grounding touch against Ezra’s pinkie all the way up his arm and across his shoulders. “I'm going to be honest with you, okay?”

Ezra nods, his neck stiff against Kanan’s fingers as if expecting a strike.

“You’re right that it was hard. It still is. Every day I worried that I was doing something wrong. Sometimes I did do things wrong. I was scared that we wouldn’t be able to escape Order 66 and the Empire and that I was going to lose you no matter what I tried to do to keep you safe. I once tried to find your parents because I thought I was going to screw you up, but I was too late. And I never stopped worrying just because you grew up and started training in the ways of the Force again.”

“See—!“

“Look. You’ve done things that scare me. I thought I lost you after fighting the Grand Inquisitor. You’ve made stupid, risky mistakes. But there is _nothing_ you could do that would make me leave you. If you fell to the Dark Side tomorrow, I would probably die trying to bring you home. I get in my own head about failing you too. We’re just going to have to keep working on balancing our roles as family and as Jedi.”

Ezra leans back into his arm a little with a short sniffle, seemingly finished with his emotional outpour and stewing on his words. “Maybe this is why the Jedi had rules about attachments. It’s too complicated to just…separate it like that.”

“Maybe—or maybe this is what the Jedi are like now, and we’re going to have to tread this new ground together.” Kanan withdraws his hand from Ezra’s shoulder slowly with a final squeeze, stopping when he denotes the place where Ezra’s longer hair would usually sit and brush against his fingers. In the moment of trying to comfort Ezra he hadn’t really noticed, but now he does. He runs his fingers around the neck of Ezra’s shirt before the kid jumps and presumably gives him a funny look.

“Um, Kanan…?”

“Did you cut your hair?”

“Hm? Oh, yeah, I did. Well, Sabine did when I asked. She said I might have to learn how to trim facial hair too soon, but—“

Kanan lets out a groan, dramatically rubbing his nose. “Ugh, stop, you’re making me feel old.”

“You can’t be serious!”

“Yes, Ezra, I am serious,” Kanan moves his hand to the front of Ezra’s face, testing the length of the front strands while Ezra begrudgingly guides his hand into ruffling his shorter hair up. “I remember when I tried to give you a haircut as a kid and you tried to rip my damn arm off with your teeth in protest.”

Ezra huffs, mumbles a quick “Don’t be so dramatic, it was one bite.”

“Uh-huh,” Kanan huffs, trying to settle Ezra’s short hair by touch and likely failing. “You know they never told me at the Temple my Padawan’s specialty would be biting.”

This time Ezra groans, lightly slapping away Kanan’s hands with a laugh.

There’s a beat where Kanan can feel Atollon’s sunset against his cheeks and thinks it’s the best he’s felt in months. Ezra’s presence at his side is a comfort as well, even if he’s done some growing up since the last time they really talked like this. It _does_ make him feel old, like he said, but happy in a nostalgic way too. 

He doesn’t miss the struggle of Ezra’s younger days. The inadequacy he felt about taking care of a child when on that same day he’d lost his Master who he couldn’t save weighed heavily on him. He doesn’t miss being a bartender or a cargo pilot or whatever else would pay for them to stay alive that month. He certainly doesn’t miss that emptiness away from the Force, even if it tugged at him on occasion and it was comparatively much easier to hide his talents than fight off Inquisitors and Sith Lords every week.

He sometimes does miss spending so much time with Ezra. Kanan was most of Ezra's social life outside of what few non-Emperial schools there were on Outer Rim planets that the kid hopped in and out of at times. Neither of them were every really alone in that sense.

Even if his only company was a seven-year-old that was constantly testing his boundaries and Kanan’s patience, it was another once-Jedi that knew all of the pain and sorrow after the Temple’s destruction and still woke up the next morning smiling about frozen space waffles. 

It’s a lot of small things: the time Ezra got punched in the face defending some street kid he didn’t even know, the way Ezra struggled with saying “Kanan" and “Jarrus" instead of “Caleb” and his old last name “Bridger”, and most often how often Ezra really did look happy, especially those last few years on the _Ghost_ long before his fifteenth birthday.

“I think that’s how I’ll always see you, you know. Even when I had my eyes I don’t think I ever stopped looking for all the ways you were still that annoying little kid that wouldn’t stop following me around the Temple.”

“Annoying? I think you mean strong in the Force. I knew about our bond before you did.”

“Mmm, no. I give that credit to Master Billaba. She was the one that told me I had a shadow that was tailing us instead of following Master Plo like the other younglings.”

Ezra waits a moment, measuring him up, maybe. “You’re not gonna cry on me, are you?” 

“Not today, I don’t think. Not over that. I could cry laughing thinking about the time we visited Fest, if you want.”

“No thank you,” Ezra says, a warning tone clear through his attempt at being uninterested and nonchalant his refusal.

“Aw, but you were so small! So bundled up you could barely waddle—“

“Please don’t—“

“You had to grab my hands and walk on my boots whenever we left the tunnels—“

“Kanan—“

“And then you and some of the locals started playing that game on the ice—“

“I'm getting up now.”

“But you didn’t know how to skate well and one of the other kids made you fall on your butt—“

“I’m leaving! I’m walking away!”

“And then you started crying and the tears and snot froze all over your face!”

“ _Oh my_ —“

“It was sweet! I bet I still have the holo of it somewhere!”

“ _DAD!_ ”

**Author's Note:**

> After the Angst Train that this fic turned out to be, I decided that ending was appropriate. Because under all of the complicated dynamics at play between these two, I love the idea of Kanan acting like an Extra Dorky Dad to torture Ezra. That moment guest starred Fest because it’s an ice planet and based on the amount of rebelcaptain fic I’ve written that some of your may or may not have read, I love throwing some love to Cassian Andor via his home planet.
> 
> (Feel free to ask me about my Rogue One/Ghost Crew friendship headcanons sometime [on my tumblr](http://www.imgoingtocrash.tumblr.com), because I have a lot of them and I'm sure my best friend is tired of hearing them. Or anything else, really.)


End file.
